The Time is Right for Direct-To-Fan Marketing of Music

By Jason Feinberg, June 24, 2009

As the music industry continues to evolve and search for a sustainable and profitable business model, the direct-to-fan (D2F) approach is making great advances, from artists just starting their career up to superstars with massive fan bases.

Artists marketing and selling directly to their audience is not necessarily a new or revolutionary concept -- one can find examples of artists offering their products to customers directly in every generation of music. For established artists, it is used as a way to inexpensively leverage all the awareness they have amassed. For evolving artists, it is often a necessity. Without a label and distributor, the usual options for new artists have been selling music at live shows, selling through fan clubs or sympathetic indie record stores -- or sometimes just selling out of the trunk of a car (which is how N.W.A. got started). But today, advances in technology have opened up exciting new avenues for direct-to-fan sales.

SUCCESSES IN THE DIRECT-TO-FAN MARKET

Direct-to-fan sales and marketing have seen a significant spike in recent years thanks to a number of factors. First, technology has given artists at all levels the opportunity to sell and market to their fans in a clear, inexpensive, engaging fashion online. Second, many emerging artists see less value in signing to a label and instead choose to steer clear of entangling contractual obligations. Finally, established artists are choosing not to renew their label contracts at a record pace, realizing that the brand they have developed can be leveraged without a label. All of these situations benefit greatly from direct-to-fan initiatives.

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This article originally appeared in MediaShift , a blog by Jason Feinberg

Get your Merchandise/tickets sales money into your PayPal account

Many artists have been asking us where do the funds from their ticket or merchise sales end up? And more importantly, how to make those funds end up in their existing Paypal account?

After a sale has been made to a fan, on the next round hour we will contact Paypal (automatically, we don't call them =)), and tell them to transfer the funds to the artist. We do that by giving Paypal the email address we have for that artist. Until now, we used the email address you gave us when you signed up.

We've just introduced a new feature that allows you to enter your existing Paypal account email, to be used to transfer those funds, on the artist portal under Profile->Paypal Profile. This email address will only be used for the Paypal transactions; we still use your primary email address for all other communications with you.
If we don't have a Paypal email for you, we still would use your primary email address for the Paypal transactions.

Also on the profile->Paypal profile page is where you can add email addresses for an affiliate service charge (for settlement through Paypal) as well as fulfillment entity email. That's a topic for a separate post;-)

To learn more log into the artist portal on Adva Mobile.

Thanks for reading and rock the stage!

Do you have a mailing list signup form in your gigs? Add mobile signup to it!

Hi Everyone,

As promised , 300 bands make us very happy and in return we want to make you happy, by pumping more helpful features you asked for!

This one has been asked for a while back, and we've been waiting for approvals from the operators to do it, now we can!!!

So, if you have a mailing list signup form on the merch table, for example, now you can add to it "Join my Mobile Fan Club". You need to get your fans 10-digit phone number, and their carrier (we don't support all of them, but we support many!). Here's an example for a ready form for you.

Once you have those phone numbers and carriers, email them to fansignupform@advamobile.com or fax it to us (the fax number is on the Promote page on the artist portal.

Next, tell your fans to expect an invitation to your mobile fan club to come on their phones as an SMS, which we will send in the next 14 days (just to give you a little time to tell your fans).

Once your fans receive the SMS, all they have to do it to reply YES or Y (case insensitive), and that's it! they'll get another SMS with a link to your site and they're done!

We will send you a report that will tell you how many SMSs went out and you'll be able to see on the portal how many new fans you have!

To learn more, or see other promotional tools, check out the Promotion page on the artist portal.

Celebrating the 300th band to join!

In the world of entrepreneurship, every small reason for celebration counts. This one is a big reason for celebration: We've passed the 300 bands mark this weekend with Vertigo, Wonder Bars and others to join our service. We now have little over 600 fans, with an uneven distribution between bands that have hundreds of fans, and some that have less.

In the months since launching, we've been privileged with increasing attention from the bands who joined, specifically with suggestions for improvement, new features and picking on the bugs we've managed to produce along the way. For everyone who emailed us with comments, suggestions, and frustrated bug issues, a BIG THANK YOU!

One learning that's worth sharing, was that sometimes, things just have their natural course of action, specifically, timing. When we started, musicians barely signed up for the service and that was it. Since then, musicians have been adding videos and downloads to their home page, adding exclusive content for download, added gigs, blogs, have taken advantage of our Artist Data integrations, and more recently, have started SMS-blasting their fans with news and alerts.
It's all happening!

The next step for musicians, we hope, is to discover how simple and effective it is to sell tickets and merchandise to fans right on their mobile phone (perhaps at the show), using our PayPal integration.

But we're not settling down...We've been hard at work on new features that allow you to better promote your mobile fan club to your fans, sell tickets and merchandise and much more. We'll share it all in the coming days!

Until then...thank-you, from the Adva Mobile team!

Quarter Inch Holes

I could wax poetic for years about Ted Leavitt, marketing professor at Harvard. The hundreds of business books written over the last 25 years, in my opinion, merely restate the insights he provided in the 50's and 60's. While musing about people's buying habits, he famously said. "People don't want quarter inch drill bits. They want quarter inch holes."

Hard man, there, Mr. Leavitt. The movement of money from one pocket to another is reduced to understanding and fulfilling a need.

It's worth the effort to think about what job people are trying to get done when they hire out your 3:30 song. I recently read of a market researcher who was seeking to understand the jobs that customers were trying to get done when they hired a milk shake, so it's not a foolish effort. Music fans don't want recordings, they want the experience of feeling the way they do when they're moved by your music. And that experience is wrapped up into much more than your music (although that's where it starts). The totality of their relationship with you drives them to choose your sound when they want that experience. Wrap your music around an artist - fan relationship and the impact of your music will grow stronger.

EleventySeven makes a huge splash!

We're very happy to have Eleventyseven get their own Mobile Fan Club yesterday! Text Eleventyseven to 43863 (spells GETME on your phone) or click here to join for music downloads, alerts and much more.

We're even happier because Eleventyseven, with some Facebook promotions and more, now have a couple hundred fans opted into their service! and they just sent their first SMS alert this morning.

You guys at Eleventyseven: YOU ROCK!!!

There's a new look to the Adva Mobile Website!

Those of you who visited Adva Mobile's site last week noticed a new website image for Adva Mobile. Sleek, with grey tones, a little "flash", and more functional, we've become very "Web 2.0". 

We'll add a few more features in the coming weeks based on requests we've recived from musicians, promoters and labels. For those of you who haven't visited, check us out and have fun exploring the world of Adva Mobile and mobile marketing services for music artists.